The first, that there is already so much unsettled land in private hands as to afford room for an immense future population, although the crown not only withheld its grants, but annihilated its soil.
Edmund Burke
The Public Record
Edmund Burke was an Anglo-Irish writer, philosopher, and politician who is widely credited as the founder of the cultural and political philosophy of conservatism. Regarded as one of the most influential conservative thinkers and political writers of the 18th century, Burke spent the majority of his career in Great Britain and was elected as a member of Parliament (MP) from 1766 to 1794 in the House of Commons of Great Britain with the Whig Party. His writings played a significant role in influencing public views and opinions in both Great Britain and France following the French Revolution in 1789, and he remains a major figure in modern conservative circles.
gutenberg.org
They who carried on this system looked to the irresistible force of Great Britain for their support in their acts of power.
This disposition is the true source of the passion which many men in very humble life have taken to the American war.
The whole is delusion, from one end to the other.
Adhering, Sir, as I do, to this policy, as well as for the reasons I have just given, I think this new project of hedging in population to be neither prudent nor practicable.
There is a law of neighborhood which does not leave a man perfect master on his own ground.
Those which are rather conclusions of legal reason than matters of statutable provision belong to universal equity, and are universally applicable.
It has ever been the method of public jurists to draw a great part of the analogies on which they form the law of nations from the principles of law which prevail in civil community.
The temper and character which prevail in our colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art.
Its foundation is laid in Regicide, in Jacobinism, and in Atheism; and it has joined to those principles a body of systematic manners which secures their operation.
All the relations of life are at once dissolved.
Instead of the religion and the law by which they were in a great politic communion with the Christian world, they have constructed their republic on three bases, all fundamentally opposite to those on which the communities of Europe are…
You cannot persuade them to burn their books of curious science, to banish their lawyers from their courts of law, or to quench the lights of their assemblies by refusing to choose those persons who are best read in their privileges.
On this head the parent law is express and clear, and has made many wise provisions, which, without destroying, regulate and restrain the right of ownership by the right of vicinage.
Such another example of boldness and contrivance I believe the world cannot furnish.
So, after some time, and after one of the most rigid conquests that we read of in history, the Normans softened into the English.
I am not ripe to pass sentence on the gravest public bodies, intrusted with magistracies of great authority and dignity, and charged with the safety of their fellow-citizens, upon the very same title that I am.
God forbid that prudence, the first of all the virtues, as well as the supreme director of them all, should ever be employed in the service of any of the vices!
He claims glory and renown from that by which every other person since the beginning of time has been dishonored and disgraced.
It is putting things into the position of an ugly alternative, into which I hope in God they never will be put.
Will it not teach them that the government against which a claim of liberty is tantamount to high treason is a government to which submission is equivalent to slavery?
The tenderness of the executive power is the natural asylum of those upon whom the laws have declared war; and to complain that men are inclined to favor the means of their own safety is so absurd, that one forgets the injustice in the…
He treats the official and regular Directors with just contempt, as a parcel of mean, mechanical book-keepers.
My Lords, I will venture to say, there is no man but owes something to his character.
A man is certainly the most perfect Protestant who protests against the whole Christian religion.
Politicians like Edmund Burke
